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How do you tell the difference between a good SEO consultant and a bad one?

Look at their SEO reports.

Bad SEO Reports: Bloated with loads of pointless data, (or not enough data) and little/no useful advice for a client. It’s basically just a data dump.

Good SEO Reports: Summarises key data, provides commentary on any fluctuations and provides actionable insights. It not only shows a client what work has been done, it explains why.

From the quick export to the detailed 100-page monstrosity, there is no definitive SEO report. And no matter the length and depth of your report, they take a while to create.

So it’s time to answer a question:

Do you want to create good SEO reports or just okay-ish ones?

What is an SEO report?

SEO reports give an overview of how a website is performing in search engines.

Their focus is typically on domain metrics, organic traffic, and rankings. But they also highlight any work done by the SEO agency or freelancer.

Good SEO is based on planning and actually doing the work day in, day out. An SEO report is the analysis of this planning and work combo, in order to see the effects produced.

It goes without saying really: without analysing your work, how do you know it’s working?

But an SEO report isn’t just for your benefit, primarily it’s for your clients.

Without the client being sat next to you while you work, they are going to have no way of knowing what you are doing.

Usually, the report is the only way they will be able to see the work you are doing (or the effects of it at least). So an easy to digest report allows clients to vet your work and justify why they keep paying you.

An effective SEO report conveys three things:

Progress: Not only is this the knowledge you are giving the client (why they hired you), the report should also show progress. E.g. How much you have grown their site that month? And how have you moved the needle since the last report?

Insights: Your knowledge of things that apply directly to your client, specifically: highlighting issues and areas that still need work over the upcoming months.

Recommendations: What you would recommend the client do to reach their goals?

Your client wants to see how their money is being spent. They want to understand the work being done on their site. And they want to track progress.

Get ready for acronym overload:

Basically, they want to see the ROI of SEO.

In short, a client wants proof that paying for SEO is bringing in a positive return on investment for their company.

Which leads on nicely to…

What do clients want to see in an SEO report?

This is really dependent on the client, which feels like a non-answer. But different clients will want to see different things.

However, there are some things all clients will want to see and know:

SEO Health: Overview of technical problems and errors that may affect SEO visibility.

Backlink Health: See the type of backlinks pointing at the client’s site.

Ranking Progress: See how rankings have changed and to keep tabs on any potential drop-offs.

An SEO report isn’t just a data dump. It’s all about helping a client to make sense of this data.

Don’t try and play smart and overwhelm clients with graphs and numbers.

Plot twist: Clients are people too.

Most people would rather cancel a service that they find hard to understand. Your job (and by extension the SEO report’s job) is to help clients make sense of things.

Any SEO worth their salt needs to be looking for trends and exploring why and how metrics correlate with one another. And this needs to be communicated to the client in an easy to read and informative report.

How long does it take to create this?

You can easily spend hours upon hours exporting data, cleaning it up, copy and pasting it, downloading graphs and so on.

But is this the best use of your time? Is this the best way to spend your client’s money?

Creating an aesthetically pleasing report can convey marketing capability and help the client understand what you are actually doing.

But remember:

Don’t get sidetracked making really fancy reports. There’s a fine line between presentable and indulgent.

A report that’s all style and no substance is only going to help you for so long.

That’s where report templates come in.

So how do I make an SEO report?

There are three things that go into making an SEO report that a client really wants to see. An effective client SEO report needs to:

Pull data;

Explain it;

Make further recommendations

Just like you, clients are busy spinning plates and wearing lots of hats (figuratively, not literally).

A clear marketing report goes a long way in helping them see impactful highlights (without reading an overly long report).

Steal our SEO report template

Our reporting template is by no means the best out there, nor is it a one-size-fits-all solution.

But it is a great starting point to create your first SEO report. Or to maybe just provide some structure to an existing report.

To get started creating SEO reports your clients will actually want to read, you are going to need a few tools to work with and to modify our template:

On the overview page, you’ll be able to grab a screenshot of the health score, URLs crawled and page types.

Copy this into the slide under the ‘This month’ heading.

What’s useful about the audit tool is you can schedule it to run. It would be a good idea to run this monthly so you have new stats each month to compare it to.

Sidenote.

If you have only just started using the audit tool and have no previous data to reference, don’t worry. Just delete the ‘Last month’ box for now. In future, to get data from previous crawl reports go to Site Audit > Project > All crawls.

In the text box provided on the slide, you can give some insights into what’s gone up or down, and why this might be the case.

What type of things can you include in your report? Well here are some of the most common SEO issues:

Duplicate content & low word counts

Go to Reports > Content quality. This will show you duplicate content clusters and word counts of pages on your client’s site:

Having duplicate content on a site is a no-no. Aside from being of no use to visitors (and therefore search engines), you’ll have pages competing with each other in the SERPs.

This will negatively affect rankings because search engine crawlers won’t know what pages to serve up.

As for word count, while there is no minimum word count for a page, Google does rank more in-depth content higher. Therefore it’s safe to say that low word counts are not going to rank as well.

Missing alt tags & broken images

Go to Resources > Images to see missing alt tags:

Although search engines are pretty advanced, when it comes to images they still need a little help. This is where alt tags come in to help them understand what the images are about via text descriptions.

Site Audit will visualize missing alt tags, image sizes and load times which can then be added to your report.

HTML issues

Specifically, these issues are most commonly to do with title tags, H1 tags and meta descriptions. Go to Internal > HTML tags for a sweet graph that visualizes all of these:

Broken links

Go to Reports > Outgoing links and you’ll be able to see if your site has too many on page links, temporary redirects & Broken internal and external links.

Broken links are inevitable. As a website grows, links get changed (without being redirected) and you get 404 pages. It happens. And it becomes a big problem when you’ve got hundreds of 404 pages.

A user landing on a 404 page is not getting the information they wanted, which can result in loss of traffic.

They also waste your crawl budget. If a search engine crawler visits your site and sees a mountain of broken links, there’s a chance your working pages won’t get crawled and indexed.

Identify broken links in the Site Audit tool and fix them. Make a note of how many you fixed and add this to the report to let your client know.

4. URLs Crawled

This slide goes into more detail about the SEO health of the site; focusing on the health score and number of URLs crawled.

The website might have a lot more or a lot fewer pages by the time you recrawl it, which will affect the total number of issues.

So it would make sense to show your client not only the difference between the current and previous month but also the full progress since you took over their website, relative to the number of existing pages of their website.

To find these graphs, go to Project history in Site Audit. At the top, you’ll see graphs for URLs crawled and a breakdown of the health score.

5. SEO Health

Depending on your comments on the previous slides, this is here to enable you to go into more detail about aspects of SEO Health.

Here you can mention further specific SEO health tasks that have been completed for that month. And then provide the relevant graph.

To the left of the Site Audit tool, under reports, you’ll be able to generate different reports on technical aspects of performance, such:

HTML tags: Title lengths, duplicates, missing meta descriptions;

Content: Word counts and duplicate content;

Links: Link types, incoming and outgoing;

Performance: Page speed — how fast is your website loading?

6. Backlink Profile Overview

Next up is the backlink profile: showing the client the type of backlinks pointing at their site and the organic traffic they are driving.

One of the biggest challenges of SEO is link building. The backlink overview section is a chance to communicate with clients this importance.

This slide will show the backlink health in more detail, like new & lost domains.

Don’t forget to manually type in the traffic and keywords per month figures. Sorry, no copy and pasting here! But you don’t want your clients to miss the great results you got them.

Tip: View Traffic by Country

Did you know Ahrefs allows you to view organic traffic by country, too?

This may be useful for clients that aren’t US-based, as you can show them that their traffic is coming from their target market/country they’re from.

To the right of the organic traffic graph is a list of countries, click one or select from the drop-down:

What you are looking for here is sudden peaks to indicate things working well (such as a blog post going viral) or drop-offs to indicate that something has stopped working.

Be sure to communicate this to your client in the bullet points provided.

9. Organic Positions

Not only is it useful to show clients the organic traffic you are driving to their website, but also how this is distributed across the keywords. Ahrefs’ position distribution history graphs do this nicely:

To get to it, while on the Organic search tab of Site Explorer, just scroll down and you’ll find it below the keywords graph.

These graphs show the spread of organic rankings across the website pages. They give a rounded view of how the organic keywords are performing across the site by showing:

The top 3 positions;

Positions 4 -10;

Positions 11–50

10. Organic Keywords

You can’t really have an SEO report without mentioning rankings. Not only are they an essential part of search visibility, they are a good indicator of whether your online marketing strategy is working.

On the next slides, you’ll be able to showcase organic rankings, how these rankings have changed and keep tabs on any potential drop-offs.

More specifically, you can show clients the keywords that bring in the most traffic, but at this moment might be different from those that they actually wish to rank for.

By keeping them in the loop about the best performing keywords and pages, you will help your clients better understand what kind of search traffic their website gets.

Leading on from the organic traffic analysis, this slide is made up of 2 screenshots from the organic search tab in Site Explorer.

Before we report on the keyword rankings you are tracking, you’ll want to identify search terms that are bringing in traffic using Ahrefs’ organic keyword tool.

Ranking number 1 for a keyword that brings in zero traffic is pretty pointless and a perfect example of a vanity metric.

To get your top organic keywords, on the Site Explorer overview, go to the organic search tab. Then scroll down and you’ll see your top 5 organic keywords. These are the keywords that bring the most organic traffic to your site.

Screenshot them and add them to the slide.

11. Ranking Visibility

It wouldn’t be an SEO report if we didn’t mention rankings now, would it?

Go to the Rank Tracker tool and select your client. Take a screenshot of the overview widget and add to the slide.

As a good overview of your client’s most important keywords, you can show them performance over time. Clicking on the positions widget shows how many keywords are in Top 3, 4–10, 11–50, etc.

In the top left, you can toggle between desktop and mobile views. But for even more SERP data, you can click on the widgets and toggle for a more detailed view.

You can get small graphs showing trends of Visibility, Avg. Position and Traffic (for these specific keywords).

These graphs give a quick overview of your keywords you are tracking. Specifically:

Visibility: the percentage of all clicks for the tracked keywords that go to your client’s website.

Average position: self-explanatory really, but the average ranking position across all keywords from 1 to 100.

Traffic: this is Ahrefs estimation of organic traffic going to a URL (calculation based on search volume and website position).

SERP features: how many SERP features (featured snippet, image pack, video etc) are present for the tracked keywords.

Positions: the number of keywords that have seen an increase or decrease in position.

12. Ranking Insights

This slide shows your client what is happening in the search results for their keywords in terms of SERP features. The ones that they can own, and the ones that they cannot own.

You can click on any feature to put the focus there. For instance, on the screenshot above you can see that there are a ton of Featured Snippet opportunities among the tracked keywords, but the client’s website is hardly ranking in any.

Not only can you show your client SERP features they are missing, but you can also show the features they are appearing in. This shows them that the SEO is working.

It’s useful to show these graphs to your client because they show how people are engaging with their website. And therefore give you evidence to back up your suggestions

For example, say you notice an increase in keywords appearing in the Image pack:

You can then suggest to your client that they produce more content featuring high-quality images and prioritise image optimization.

Tip: Keyword Quick Wins

With Ahrefs, you can really drill down into your client’s keywords

Using Ahrefs’ filters, you can run an organic keyword report to show keywords ranking at position 5 for high volume keywords.

If you are only tracking a handful of keywords, you could include them all in the report. On the other hand, if you are tracking hundreds of keywords you could filter out only 10–20 of the most crucial keywords that a customer cares about the most.

However you decide to show your client rankings, the good thing about them is: even if your traffic is not going up, rankings can tell you if the website is moving in the right or wrong direction.

What do you want to show clients?

Total number of ranking keywords

Amount of organic traffic generated by those keywords

What URL is ranking for these terms

14. Next Month

After sending your client all this data and graphs, you need to give them a plan of what you will be working on next month to continue improving SEO or fixing things that are holding the website back.

A quick to-do list that lays out your actions for next month will suffice.

This has two benefits:

It lets your client know what is on your plate for the next month.

It reinforces the idea that they should continue paying you to do good work.

Feel free to modify our sample SEO report

So there you have it. A fully customisable SEO reporting template to give to your clients. Check out our sample report below:

The best way to think of this report is as a base to build upon. You can customise it however you please, adding data from Google Analytics (e.g. for sales/leads) and other sources to really tailor it to your client.

By utilising our reporting template (that you can use for every client), you’ll automate a lot of your workflow and save yourself hours per month.

Just think of all those meta descriptions you can re-write now!

It might not be your favourite part of SEO, but putting together reports for clients can be a useful exercise for both yourself and clients.

A clean and well-written report lets your clients see the hard work you are doing and hopefully helps to demystify your SEO work.

Feel free to edit and tweak the template to suit yours and your client’s needs. If you think we’ve missed anything, let us know in the comments below.